Comic for Friday, February 27th

This was a page I was hoping would look more impressive. I just couldn’t quite get a composition that had the air ship more imposing while still showing the MSB members.

That said, there are some improvements – this panel features the first in comic use of gradient fills, and I’m fairly pleased with the results. It will take some more fine tuning, but seems a solid compromise between the time intensive hand shading I do for the digital paintings (such as the new vote incentive! See above to the left of the comic to vote for us on TWC! Or, as always, available on Patreon!) and the minimalist cel shading I’ve used in comic. It is more time intensive, but I think worth it.

Bet you thought I forgot about world info segments… Ha! As if! I love chattering endlessly to myself!

The story is set in Malsa, in the dimension generally called Tria. While that’s the I.D.S name for it, until the I.D.S arrived from Mythen, their world/dimension, the people of Tria didn’t know they needed to name their dimension as they weren’t aware there were other ones.

Though Tria has widespread knowledge of magic for a long time and their technology level was moderate to high, the IDS arrival brought several radical new technologies – primary among them is the autocaster. Autocasters, discussed in a commentary previously, are pretty big game changers, and were immediately widely adopted for use in Tria, Malsa being no exception. The IDS’s vastly superior technology in that front has allowed them to a very profitably bargaining position with the governments of Tria.

The other technology that was at least as revolutionary was the dimension gate technology. While the IDS has never constructed a Bridgepoint (a semi permanent gateway) they have and frequently use “hop” or “transfer” gates – gates that sync a point in space, crossing everything in a designated area over to the other dimension – people included. This technology is heavily restricted, but also massively important. There are quite a few items that have massive value disparities between dimensions – a company with interdimensional access has a crushing advantage over its competition – this access is in theory almost entirely regulated do the to the IDS ability to detect the syncs created by these gates.